Rolling up at another Oscars party in Los Angeles, as camera lights blazed, celebrities preened and a drone hovered, Stephen Fry concluded that the climax of Hollywood’s annual referendum on itself was, all things considered, a perfectly preposterous place for a honeymoon.

“You forget what this town is like, the way human beings behave in the way they do. It really is bizarre,” he said, hugging Carrie Fisher, aka Princess Leia, scanning the crowd for his misplaced husband, Elliott Spencer, and giving every impression of enjoying it all.

Elliott can imagine more enjoyable ways of spending time than listening to intense people from this industry

Stephen Fry

Spencer, whom he married last month, was agog at the sights and sounds of Hollywood campaigning on the eve of Sunday’s Academy Awards, said Fry, a veteran of entertainment industry jamborees. “For someone who has never been here before, it’s bewildering. Even if you’ve seen movies or read books that describe Hollywood and the industry, it’s still extraordinary when you encounter it. It’s fair to say [Elliott] can imagine many other more enjoyable ways of spending time than listening to intense people from this industry.”

The actor was speaking on Thursday night from the green carpet of the Oscar Wilde: Honouring the Irish in Film event, an annual knees-up sponsored by the US-Ireland Alliance, reputedly the most laid-back of all Hollywood’s social gatherings this week, even though a drone was filming it.

“It’s the most irreverent event. It has the best music and certainly the most Guinness,” said JJ Abrams, the Star Wars director, who hosted it at his Bad Robot studios in Santa Monica. “It’s also a place where people can come and have a loose, fun time in a typically tense weekend for a lot of people. It’s a way to unwind before you wind back up again.”

For all the smiles that will gleam from the Dolby theatre during the 87th Oscars it turns out that almost everyone is on edge. LA, after all, is a town of perpetual sunshine and palm trees where you detect autumn not by falling leaves, but the release of relatively cerebral films for awards season, a marathon of different ceremonies dished out by industry guilds, societies and critics, culminating in the Oscars, when nominees, weary from publicity campaigns and diets, don gowns and tuxedos for the biggest nailbiter of all.

By then, nominees confide, the initial thrill of nomination can curdle into angst that all the fuss will peak with the envelope being opened and your name not being called, and precisely at that moment of pulverising disappointment you must feign delight for the winner, because you’re on camera.

“That road is paved with glass and razor wire, as far as I’m concerned,” Bill Murray told GQ, reflecting on 2004 when he was favourite for best actor for Lost in Translation but lost to Sean Penn, for Mystic River.

Spare a thought, then, for Roger Deakins, a British cinematographer who has been nominated 11 times and never grasped a gong. Sunday will be his 12th, opportunity, for Unbroken, and he’s not the favourite.

Only two people know the results in advance: Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, accountants who collate the results at PricewaterhouseCoopers’ downtown LA office.

Winning presents its own sweat-inducing dread – the speech. The allotted 45 seconds is sufficient time to baffle, bore or embarrass and spark a conflagration on social media, a raucous audience giving instantaneous feedback.

Mockery of John Travolta fuelled the more than 17m Oscar-related tweets sent during last year’s broadcast. The Pulp Fiction star was not even making a speech, merely introducing the singer Idina Menzel, and mangled it to Adele Dazeem, unleashing countless memes. In apparent bid for redemption, he will be back presenting on Sunday.

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Lobbying by studios stokes tension weeks and even months before the big night, said Beverly D’Angelo, who is best known for playing Ellen Griswold in the National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, and is one of the academy’s 6,292 voting members.

“The campaigning adds an air of a competitive sport to it that I can’t stand. There’s a lot of pressure. Awareness is everything. People want to get their films seen and recognised. Things can get distorted a bit, away from the art.”

Voters were supposed to focus purely on artistic merit but marketing intruded, she said. “What are you going to do? It’s the beast. It’s also a huge television show.”

Last year 45 million viewers tuned into the three-hour programme, the highest ratings in a decade. Advertisers expect another bumper viewership: they are paying an average of $1.95m for a 30-second spot, up 8% from last year, generating potentially more than $100m for ABC, which has broadcasting rights.

Statuettes can deliver not just prestige but a box office boost so studios invest heavily in marketing campaigns, some more brazenly than others.

With billboards and ads for The Imitation Game, the Weinstein Company told academy members that a vote for the Alan Turing biopic would atone for the persecution of gay men under Britain’s gross indecency laws: “Honour this movie. Honour this man. And honour the movement to bring justice to the other 49,000.”

A few months ago Richard Linklater was considered a certainty for best director for Boyhood but then Fox Searchlight Pictures sensed he was “vulnerable”, according to the Hollywood Reporter, and started splashing images of its own director, Alejandro González Iñárritu, in ads for Birdman.

Eddie Redmayne has shored up his chances to take best actor for The Theory of Everything, and made himself a household name in the US with affable turns on talk shows and red carpet events, including his cheerful admission that the whole razzmatazz makes him sweat.

He’s not the only one. So-called “talent wranglers” stay a few steps ahead of stars on the red carpet for the fraught task of prioritising interviewers from the media pack. Or, if the talent is low-watt, for the even trickier task of whipping up interest.

The talk show host Stephen Colbert, who turned heads by sporting a beard at the Oscar Wilde event, said Washington could learn from Hollywood politicking. “Oscar campaigns seem to get something for their candidate without spending as much money. And they also provide better entertainment to the public.” Tinseltown had an additional lesson for Democrats and Republicans, he said; it has “much more attractive candidates. Even if they lose they’re prettier to look at.”